Nonknowledge Restores the Sacred
Lindsay Lerman
Draft: January 2011
At Istanbul Modern, in Istanbul, Turkey, there is an exhibition of Hussein
Chalayan’s work. One of his films, called “Anaesthetics,” is part of the exhibition.
“Anesthetics” is a film about women, and about one woman, who is the subject of most
of the film. We never see this woman speak. In fact, she seems at first to be incapable of
communication of any sort. She is dressed, undressed, fed, washed, put to sleep, even
peculiarly impregnated by two people dressed in white, wearing white gloves. All of this
takes place in the same room, which remains the same size and shape throughout the
course of the film. The woman’s clothing, like most everything else to which she is
exposed, comes hermetically sealed and is removed from a strange space in a wall where
it appears without explanation. The woman’s face does not register any emotion. She is
thin, tall, almost pale, with expressionless eyes that don’t even stare down the camera. At
one point in the film we see a man prepare some of the woman’s food. The man is
dressed in the same manner as the woman, by the two people who look vaguely like
scientists and futuristic hospital workers, dressed all in white. The man places a fish on a
cutting board. The fish is alive, squirming and wriggling. We watch as the man kills the
fish, slicing into it and skillfully, quickly, removing its flesh and its innards. The camera
does not flinch. We see blood and some guts drip and ooze onto the cutting board. At this
point in the film I realized something: the contrast between the guts on the cutting board
and the expressionless woman is too severe. Almost painfully severe. I realized that the
woman strikes me—the audience—as incapable of bleeding, as not fully human. She
appears on the screen as though she were born in a petrie dish, hatched in a tube, beamed
down from a lab on some spaceship. I have the feeling, and I think somewhat clearly: if
this woman were to see the fish’s blood and guts on the cutting board, only two things
could happen. Either she would not register it as anything, because she is some sort of
robot creature, and no matter what is shown to her, done to her, she does not react, does
not feel, does not think. Or, she would not recover. The blood and the guts would spark
something very strange in her, she would feel horror or shock or fear or pity, and she
would not be able to return to her white room intact, ready to be fed and dressed and put
to sleep.
In another scene, we see the woman positioned to stand next to a man with a
priest’s collar peeking out from his brown tweed jacket. Suddenly, the woman is on her
knees in front of the priest, and the priest is handing her a small icon of Jesus. Jesus is
wearing red. The woman begins to eat the Jesus figurine, and it crumbles in her hands
and in her mouth as though it is a molded cake. The woman eats the Jesus, smearing the
red of his clothing all around her mouth and on her hands and wrists. The look in the
woman’s eyes is suddenly horrific. It is ravenous, murderous, deeply disturbing. The red
around her mouth clearly suggests blood. But for her beautiful dress and carefully
pinned-back hair, she looks like a cave woman consuming some small sacrificial animal,
eyes glazed over in ravenous hunger, delirium, depaysment. This scene, and the look in
the woman’s eyes, remains with me, frightening and jarring me, even as I type this now,
back at home, cup of coffee in hand.
The woman’s laceration in the scene with the Jesus figurine is clear to me.
Something happens to her momentarily, something that makes feeling and
communicating a possibility.
In the film, there seem to be these two options: cold, sterile everyday life in which
communication and emotion are not possible, and fleeting, violent, communicative,
deeply emotional moments (limit experiences). I want to ask: Why are these the only two
options? I want to ask Bataille specifically: Can we create the possibility of the
laceration, the communication, the nonknowledge in the everyday? Isn’t it already there?
Isn’t the separation between these two options already not so clear, so tidy?
In fact, in keeping with Bataille, can’t we say that there is always another option,
always a separate possibility, always an over there we haven’t recognized, even when
every bit of evidence we can find says This is all there is? Allison Leigh Brown writes
with joy and enthusiasm: “If pressed by a student, say, or a niece, to say why I find
Bataille philosophically important, I would say that in his fiction and in his theory he
shows us that while it seems as if there is only one thing, this lived life, there is always a
pointing toward there being something else too” (Reading Bataille Now 117).
Aims
My goal is to explain Bataille’s assertion that his concept of nonknowledge offers
us a particular kind of spirituality, which is uniquely capable of uniting the mundane and
the sacred. In the course of my explanation, I offer Bataille’s definition(s) of atheology,
spirituality, and nonknowledge.
Atheology, Spirituality, Communication
Bataille writes in Method of Meditation: “I am not a philosopher, but a saint,
maybe a madman” (note 6). In notes for On Nietzsche, Bataille writes: “Fundamentally,
the spiritual domain is that of the impossible” (USK 21). Bataille also writes, in Inner
Experience: “If I said decisively: ‘I have seen God’, that which I see would change.
Instead of the unconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free
before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian—to which the
unknown would be subjugated” (4).
Bataille wrote much during his relatively short lifetime. My goal is not to find
every mention of spirituality, mysticism, or saints in his work. My goal is to offer
evidence of symptomatic moments in Bataille’s writing on spirituality—moments when a
vital tension between frustration and hope animate his writing. Such tension is at play in
the three quotes above.
Atheology
In the first quote (“I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman”), we see
the tension between Bataille the thinker and Bataille the experiencer. (And there certainly
are times in his writing when this dichotomy is maintained. That is, when Bataille writes
that experience and thought as such are necessarily mutually exclusive.) The philosopher
is the thinker, the one who must subject the saint’s thought to a rigorous epistemological
examination and to the well-calibrated system of checks and balances we call the
scientific method. The madman is the fallen philosopher—the one who sees at the heart
of philosophy not truth or justified true belief or the perfect proof for the existence of
such-and-such, but the one who sees the saint’s mad scribbles, the products of the dark
night of the soul, at the heart of philosophy. The madman is the one who proclaims this
(“There is no philosophy at the heart of philosophy”), after having devoted his life to
philosophy. (Because, of course, there are also many times when Bataille strives to unite
thought and experience (or saintliness and epistemology), when he maintains hope that
such a union is possible, when he wants, even desperately wants, to be the saint and the
philosopher.) The madman knows how mad he will sound, and how his beloved
(philosophy) will forsake him. He will forever be the saint or the madman, after he says
what he must. He will never again be the philosopher. That is, Bataille knows he must
choose between the saint, the philosopher, and the madman.
“The Spiritual Domain”
In the second quote (“Fundamentally, the spiritual domain is that of the
impossible”), we can see Bataille’s debt to Nietzsche, for one, and the tension between
spirituality as available in the quotidian, the banal, and spirituality as uniquely available
according to the following: “the spiritual is what arises from ecstasy, from religious
sacrifice (from the sacred), from tragedy, from poetry, from laughter—or from anxiety”
(USK 21). Allow me to explain.
What is “the impossible”? Not so different from our average dictionary definition,
it turns out. Bataille’s use of “the impossible” means simply that which does not seem
possible. Bataille does not give specific examples of the impossible. We can be creative
and identify our own. Important for understanding “the impossible” is the possible. What
is possible is given to us by/through the complex matrix of family, society, schooling,
religion, etc. as inherently possible. Not just “possible” as in the sense of actually,
physically possible according to our laws of physics and chemistry, but “possible” in the
sense of “acceptable,” “allowable,” “respectable,” according to the guidelines laid out
and maintained by the (aforementioned) complex matrix. That which is spiritual, then,
challenges the possible and its guidelines. That which is spiritual does not simply confirm
what has been given to us as possible. It asks us, instead, What is impossible? According
to Bataille, this requires that spiritual life be lived “in relation to the impossible” (USK
21, emphasis mine). The impossible need not be the impossible.
How do we do this? What does this mean? Bataille offers only the following: “I
will say that ecstasy, sacrifice, tragedy, poetry, laughter are forms whereby life situates
itself in relation to the impossible. But these are natural forms, in that someone… writing
a poem, or someone laughing thinks nothing of placing himself in relation to the
impossible” (USK 21). Note Bataille’s use of “natural.” I take this as evidence of the
tension between the impossible as truly impossible and so possible as to be natural.
Communication
In the third quote (“If I said decisively: ‘I have seen God’, that which I see would
change. Instead of the unconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild
and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian—to
which the unknown would be subjugated”), we have an excellent example of the tension
for Bataille regarding what is communicable. At times Bataille writes that everything can
be expressed or communicated, particularly if language is pushed to a limit such that
something previously inexpressible becomes expressible. (“…this experience born of
non-knowledge…is not beyond expression—one doesn’t betray it if one speaks of it” (IE
3).) At other times, Bataille is clear that some experiences are necessarily outside the
grasp of language, of words.
This third quote is also one moment (of many) when Bataille explicitly separates
his work from religiosity and spirituality. Separates it from religion and religiosity for
perhaps obvious reasons: What Bataille seeks remains un-wrangleable by systems, rules,
codified practices, etc. (Kendall and Kendall write: “Religions are closed systems, stable
systems, guarantees. Atheology is the eradication of such guarantees” (USK xxxix).)
Bataille separates his work from spirituality (mysticism as well, sometimes) because part
of the work of spirituality, so to speak, is saying, and therefore subjugating, that which
cannot be said without subjugation, misrepresentation, or lack of fidelity. Yet, as we have
seen, Bataille maintains a keen interest in the spiritual, in spirituality.
Most importantly, this third quote assumes and asserts that unknowability is real.
There are unknowns. On Bataille’s watch, the unknowability at the heart of any matter
must remain up front.
Living in Accordance with Nonknowledge
What do these three quotes offer us? Organized against itself, organized in the direction
of its own ruin, they present the principles of what Bataille calls atheology. (Or
spirituality, or mysticism, or inner experience, or even nonknowledge, depending on the
text and the effect Bataille hoped to achieve for himself and his reader.) Each principle is
forever subject to change, is endlessly revisable, and is by definition never stable. It is an
impossible task to (momentarily) identify and live by the endlessly revisable principles,
but it is an impossibility which Bataille cannot resist attempting. (Or, perhaps, living his
life in relation to.)
What are the principles these three quotes express? They express the importance
of trading in certain knowledge for experience. They express the necessity of living life in
relation to the impossible. They encourage us to let our expression be animated by the
tension inherent to all communication. They require that we give up the guarantee of a
religious or spiritual system and its rules and guidelines. These principles form the everchanging basis—foundation—of a way of living. A way of living in accordance with
nonknowledge.
Nonknowledge
What is nonknowledge? Here is where Bataille the philosopher flexes his muscles
a bit. Here is where I flex my philosophical muscles a bit. Nonknowledge is not “aknowledge,” or the absence of knowledge. It is not “ir-knowledge” or “un-knowledge,”
or the negation of knowledge. Nonknowledge is closer to “not-knowledge,” if we
continue to look at the Latinate roots. This does not mean, however, that nonknowledge is
entirely “outside” of knowledge. I maintain that it occupies a difficult (impossible?)
position, on the threshold of knowledge and a- or ir-knowledge.
The most significant feature of nonknowledge is its resistance to appropriation or
storing up. It eludes our grasp when we want to save it up and use it in the service of
proving a universal truth. As something non-universal, unconcerned with truth (or
justified true belief), nonknowledge can only be understood “from the inside of
experience,” as Bataille says. I can try (and of course I will) to describe my experiences
of nonknowledge to you, and if I am lucky or particularly careful with my words, you
will get some hazy, fleeting sense of living the experience I describe with me, alongside
me. This is significant. Why? Nonknowledge is not a “bug” or a problem occasionally
present in human experience; is a feature of human experience and it lies at the heart of
all that we call knowledge.
Dig deep enough, Bataille urges us, and you will find un-graspable, ununiversalizable, unknowability at the heart of all we know about the atom, the genetic
code, or knowledge itself. (And yet, we know, this itself constitutes a kind of knowledge:
Unknowability is fundamentally constitutive of knowability.) Living in humble
recognition of this amounts to a revolution in everyday life. A revolution in everyday life
can only be accompanied by a “revolution in consciousness” (USK xx).
Conclusion
How do we see the everyday as the expression of nonknowledge? Bataille is not
joking when he says it requires a revolution in consciousness. We look. We laugh. We are
touched by the gesture of a stranger; we write because we must, knowing it is impossible,
about why the stranger’s gesture is touching. We are delighted, even ecstatic, when we
uncover the first signs of spring on the tree. We are raw, open, lacerated, in question, not
fully intact. We are constantly, impossibly, always prayerful. Recall Bataille’s definition
of spirituality: “the spiritual is what arises from ecstasy, from religious sacrifice (from the
sacred), from tragedy, from poetry, from laughter—or from anxiety” (USK 21). All of
this requires letting nonknowledge inform and characterize our interactions with
ourselves and the world.
Returning to “Anaesthetics”: Yes, in keeping with Bataille we can say that
recognizing, encouraging nonknowledge in the everyday is tantamount to what Bataille
calls a “revolution in consciousness itself,” whereby (the cultivation of?) laceration and
inner experience in everyday life result in gloriously useless nonknowledge and restore
value to everyday life which systems of labor and Knowledge have eroded.